Corn is among the most familiar of grains; it is also one of the
most mysterious. In this handsomely illustrated new book, Paul
Mangelsdorf, perhaps the world's foremost expert on the corn plant,
summarizes the work of a lifetime devoted to unraveling the enigma
of corn.
This unique grain--it has no close counterpart elsewhere in the
plant kingdom--exists only in association with man, and it survives
only as a result of his intervention. Thus, the story of corn is in
many ways a story about people. Combining the skills of scientist
and storyteller, Professor Mangelsdorf in his search for the origin
of corn takes the reader to archaeological digs in once-inhabited
caves in Mexico and the United States Southwest, to the discovery
of fossil pollen in drill cores taken deep below Mexico City, and
to experimental fields where the great diversity of corn is
revealed and where the plant is hybridized with its relatives
teosinte and "Tripsacum."
Drawing upon the evidence from botany, genetics, cytology,
archaeology, and history, the author seeks to evaluate various
hypotheses on the origin of corn. He concludes that the ancestor of
cultivated corn was a wild form of pod corn; that corn may have
been domesticated more than once in both Mexico and South America
from different geographical races of wild corn; and that
hybridizations between corn and its various relatives have resulted
in explosive evolution leading to a diversity of varieties and
forms unmatched in any other crop plant.
This is a book about corn, but it is a book for biologists,
agronomists, anthropologists, and historians, and for the
interested layman who would like to know something about the grain
which, "transformed, as three fourths of it is, into meat, milk,
eggs, and other animal products, is our basic food plant, as it was
of the people who preceded us in this hemisphere."
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